


Why We Can Never Have Anything Nice

by Andraste



Category: MythBusters RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mecha, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 09:46:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2503391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andraste/pseuds/Andraste
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grant Imahara saves the world just like his friends. It's just that his saving mostly involves a socket wrench.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Why We Can Never Have Anything Nice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noracharles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noracharles/gifts).



> I started writing this as a treat for Yuletide 2013. It, uh, took a while. But any season is a good season for Mecha AUs! The prompt was 'Grant builds mechas, Kari and/or Tory are pilots. They defend humanity.'
> 
> Many thanks to brideoflister for beta'ing.

“Sleeping on the job?”

Grant jerked awake at the voice from the comm. It was so cold in the repair bay that it was usually impossible to doze off there, but he'd been up most of the night before and exhaustion had to win some time. Now his neck was stiff and he could hardly feel his toes.

“Technically speaking, my shift finished three hours ago,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Just thought you might want to know they're on their way.”

“Thanks!” Adam was normally stuck in the lab until the same ungodly hour as Grant, but at least there was heating in there. He'd never have believed San Francisco could get this cold – but then, anywhere was probably cold when you were in a bunker ten miles underground.

He got up and started pacing. Waiting for the tube doors to open was always tense – it wasn't like they ever started repairs before the morning, but he liked to wait and make sure his babies were OK. Sometimes he fixed them in his dreams.

He heard the tell-tale whooshing that signalled the imminent return of the mechs, and then winced at the crash of them hitting the floor of the tube. Someone's suspension obviously wasn't working as well as it should; he'd have to take a look at that when he got the chance. The doors ground open to reveal Little Blue and Big Red, so at least both pilots seemed to have come home in one piece. Which was more than you could say for the mechs. Kari's was all torn up - deep scratches and exposed wire's everywhere - but Tory's was _carrying_ its right arm.

"What the _fuck_ did you do?!" Grant didn't even wait for Tory to finish opening the cockpit before rushing over to get a closer look at the damage. Not only had the arm been ripped off, it looked as though a particularly large and heavy truck had run over it afterwards.

"Dude, I don't know what you're complaining about. They're called Busters for a reason." Tory clambered down out of the cockpit, stripping off his helmet and protective padding as he went.

"That means that they're _for busting things_!" They both knew that it was actually a terrible acronym Adam had come up with, but that wasn't the point right now. "Not that you're meant to rip parts off and use them as melee weapons!"

"I didn't do it myself! I just improvised when the Squid tore off my sword arm."

"We'd have been in trouble if he hadn't," Kari chipped in, climbing out of Big Red. "It had me pinned down - literally." At least none of Red's limbs were missing, but there was a giant alien footprint in the middle of the chest plate that would have to be hammered out.

“At least I managed to bring the arm back. And hey, the good guys won again!” Tory said.

"So I can see,” Grant said sarcastically.

"You don't know what it's like out there, man.”

That was true. Sometimes he thought he'd do anything to get out there in a Buster himself, but it was a bad job for a guy who got motion sick watching the ocean on TV. He knew that his skills were really more valuable here, where his brain wouldn't get splattered across the greater San Francisco area if something went wrong, but sometimes it still stung to be stuck down here. 

Tory must have read his expression, because he was instantly apologetic. "Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that."

"I know," Grant said. "I just ... have no idea how I'm going to get that arm to stay on during turn around." Funding was tight. Not everyone thought that San Francisco was worth fighting for – there were plenty of people who argued that the human defence forces should pull out of California altogether and just let the Squid have it. It wasn't like they had a huge pile of spare mech limbs lying around.

“Well, we've got almost two days,” Kari said.

The aliens would be back tomorrow night, of course, but no pilot was allowed to work double shifts unless there was a real emergency. Which there had better not be, considering.

“I guess that's going to have to be enough.”

“Maybe we could help?"

"I'm afraid rewiring it may be a little complicated." It isn't that Kari and Tori don't have the right skills – everyone down here is at least half an engineer, though training or necessity – but if they knew what it was like up there, then Grant was the expert when it came to fast repairs.

“We'll all help,” Tory said. “The rest of the team will be here tomorrow, and we can get Adam and Jamie to pitch in as well if we have to.”

“I don't think they'll be able to tear themselves away from the new prototype even if the Squid rip the roof off,' Kari said.

Grant wasn't sure that having the whole repair bay full of people was actually going to make anything better, but he knew they meant well. Defending the planet was, after all, a team effort.

"Come on," he said. "We should all grab a few hours sleep if we're going to have to rebuild the whole thing tomorrow."

“While you're at it, I have a few ideas about the way the joint works,” Tory said.

Grant ground his teeth. This was why he was against human pilots in the first place - they always thought they knew better.

***

Grant was startled awake after less than five hours sleep by something, somewhere making a horrible grinding noise. Either someone was running a giant electric can opener, or something had gone horribly wrong in the weapons lab again. At first he only woke up enough to pull a pillow over his head, but after ten minutes he figured he'd better drag himself next door and find out if it was actually time for the Apocalypse yet.

Grant sometimes envied Adam and Jamie the time they had to experiment – most of his own innovations involved new and better ways to get dents beaten out. But on the other hand, the maintenance bay almost never ended up full of whirling knives.

"This is _not my fault_ ,” Adam said from underneath a bench as Grant peered around the corner. The look on Jamie's face begged to differ with Adam's assessment.

On closer examination – as close as Grant was willing to get, anyway – the blades were attached to a central sphere, probably a battery powered drone.

"Isn't the new prototype meant to be tested inside a containment field?”

“It was in a containment field! The power went out for a second, and well, there you have it.” Adam made an expressive gesture at the bay, but jerked his hand back when he remembered the knives. "On the bright side, they should run out of juice any time now."

As if on cue, the drone fell to the floor with a clatter.

"Well," Adam says, leaning out cautiously from behind the bench. "I think that went pretty well for an initial test."

"There's a hole in the wall," Jamie pointed out, arms folded.

"That just proves that it works!"

"It proves that the neighbours are going to be mad with us again. We obviously need better safety protocols if you can't keep your stuff on your side of the lab."

"Is it my fault the the generator keeps failing?" Adam said.

“I'm really not sure you should be giving those to Tory,” Grant said, hoping to distract the two of them before they could really start arguing. “The sword is probably dangerous enough without giving him sharpened projectiles.”

“They have on board AI so they avoid the other Busters,” Adam said. “They only go after Squid.”

How Adam could be sure of that without any live Squid to test them on, Grant wasn't sure. A dead one wasn't exactly the same, even to an AI, even if he could get the people in Biology to hand one over. The aliens organic technology was certainly vulnerable to bladed weapons, though, so the principle was sound. Either way, it would be smart to keep his opinions to himself on this one.

"Speaking of AI,” Grant said, “have you guys thought any more about the piloting situation?"

Jamie shrugged. “It hasn't changed. Human pilots are the best solution of all the lousy solutions we've come up with.”

When the dimensional rift first opened, they'd sent out remotely controlled drones, but the aliens had soon gotten wise and started using tech that jammed any signal they could put out. Of course it would be a lot safer to have the Busters driven by computers, but the general feeling among those who decided these things was that human pilots were more adaptable and got better results. Air strikes were still done by AI, but getting up close and personal with Squid was strictly a human job. A problem Grant thought he could solve, if only he had time to work on it.

“If I had more time to run AI tests with the Busters -”

“Plenty of people are working on that already,” Adam pointed out.

Those people were all in Seattle, or Washington, or somewhere else far away from the rift. They didn't let think-tanks work out of bases that might just get destroyed if the aliens ever came up with something good enough. Grant sometimes thought about transferring, but he knew that he'd hate just staring at computer simulations all day, never getting his hands dirty.

"Maybe you should start with teaching the drones the difference between a Squid and the wall of the lab," Jamie suggested.

"That's why we're testing!" Adam said.

It was obviously time to get out before he ended up stuck in the middle of a fight, or worse, got roped into cleaning up the mess. “I guess it's time to go put that arm back on.” He was out the door before Adam or Jamie thought of asking him for help.

***

Grant spent the whole day getting the arm back onto Little Blue, but in the end it wasn't as bad as it looked. He watched the robotic fingers flex with a deep sense of satisfaction, and that night he slept like a log for a change.

When he got to the maintenance bay the next morning, Tory and Kari were already waiting for him, with donuts. They'd left him the ones with the dubious unidentifiable purple stuff inside, but it was the thought that counted when the cafeteria only had them one day a week.

“Blue's looking good,” Kari said.

“Yep,” Grant agreed. “All ship-shape and ready for testing.”

“Adam wants me to spend today with the prototype,” Tory said.

Grant could see why he'd ask. Most of the pilots weren't nutty enough to ride around in test models, even though Adam always claims that they're perfectly safe and hardly anyone has been liquefied recently. It's sometimes disturbingly hard to tell when he's joking.

“We need to do a field test before sundown.” Regulations were clear on this point, and even if they weren't, Grant wouldn't let Tory ride in a mech that hadn't been properly checked after repairs.

“So you can walk it around for me. I mean, you don't have to fight or anything – just swing the arm around a little and make sure it's working.”

For a second, Grant thought Tory was mocking him, but Kari grinned. “Come on!” she said. “It'll be fun.” Red needed to be field tested, too, even though its repairs were more superficial.

Well, it wasn't like he was going to be upside down or anything, or as if the Squid would be out in daylight. Or as if he hadn't passed all his simulation tests with flying colours.

“Sure,” he said, trying to sound casual. “I'll take Blue out for a walk.”

***

There's no real reason to go up onto the surface, except that Grant had never actually seen the rift. He was nowhere near San Francisco the day it opened, and when the helicopter brought him to the base he'd been too busy throwing up to look. 

He stepped forward out of the tube and the Buster responded, laboriously, to his mental command. He felt the muscles in his legs twitching as his brain tried to resolve the confusion of moving and not moving at the same time. Turning his head, he could see what looked like fresh alien debris, probably from the battle a couple of days ago. They were completely safe for now, under the sunlight that burned the Squid and kept them on the other side of the rift until nightfall.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Kari said over the comms.

"Yeah, it is ... pretty cool." Pretty wasn't the right word for the blasted landscape, but in a weird way, it was beautiful. He hadn’t realised just how far you could _see_ from up here. The city is mostly just a pile of rubble now, and looking toward the bay through Blue's cameras, he felt as if he could look right across the ocean.

Grant took a few more steps, swinging the arm around. It felt fine. Good, even thought his muscles kept twitching. He was just starting to feel that he was getting the hang of walking when he put his foot straight into a pothole. The mech fell slowly as Grant gave an embarrassing girly shriek – no doubt recorded for posterity – and came to a stop face-first in the dirt.

“Are you OK?” Kari said, voice somewhere between concern and amusement.

“Fine, fine,” he said, flailing Little Blue's limbs around. "Just, y'know, field testing." Eventually he managed to get his feet back under himself. At least the arm stayed attached, proving that the repair was definitely sound, but now he'll get to spend the afternoon hosing dirt off the mech. Wonderful. "I guess that's one for the testing blooper reel."

"Nah," Kari said, and now she is laughing. "You only get on that if you actually flip over. Just ask Tory." 

“He was right, you know,” Grant said. “It's impossible to imagine what it's like up here without seeing it."

"So, is it worth looking?"

Grant turned, carefully, in a circle, taking in the wreck of the city and the sea beyond. "Worth spending the day reattaching an arm, I'd say."

"And the afternoon cleaning all that mud off? I think you trod in a Squid."

Grant tried to tilt his head to look, but Blue's neck wasn't flexible enough to let him see its feet. He'll have to work on that some time. "Ugh."

"C'mon," Kari said. "Let's go to work."


End file.
